There is often a need to access certain parts of circuit board enclosures and components thereof as well as connectors. What has become an increasingly vexing problem is the necessity to access certain parts of these enclosures while power is supplied and the system continues to operate. Not only is it advantageous from the point of view of the operator or user to allow systems to continue to perform their intended operations without interruption, but it is often important for a repair person to analyze and diagnose anomalies in the system while under normal operating conditions.
Prior art systems show certain apparatuses for removing components or sections of the printed circuit board enclosures, but only at the expense of disconnecting the power supply from the rest of the system.
In U.S. Pat. No. 4,977,532, for example, not only is the power supply removed and disconnected from the system during circuit trouble shooting, but so too are the logic circuits, circuit boards, fans, etc. In fact, the conventional wisdom is to provide quick disconnects and locator pins to facilitate the assembly and disassembly of various components from the circuit board enclosure.
Conventionally, service personnel use jumper cables and wire harnesses to reconnect the power supply to the operating components of the system during a test. Such an operation, however, still requires removal of the lids or covers of the enclosures. Unfortunately, this sort of bypass of direct connections leads to electrical problems, shock hazards, noise, electromagnetic interference, RF interference and other altered electrical characteristics.
It is also very common to have to reconfigure a system depending on the types of boards used and the positions of the boards in the card cage relative to one another. Certain types of electrical devices such as shunts, jumper cables, I/O connectors, etc., must be set or adjusted in ways that make it extremely difficult for conventional systems to be so reconfigured. The present invention seeks to make possible the reconfiguring of a circuit board system without the need to utilize shunts, jumper cables, I/O connectors and other by-pass equipment.
The geometry of conventional circuit board enclosure systems are such that their permanently attached power supplies have resulted in extreme repair and testing difficulties when the other parts or components of the system must be analyzed or accessed.
It is, of course, much easier to repair or replace a component or power supply that is easily accessible than to repair one that is permanently affixed, or buried beneath other components or hardware fixtures.
It would be advantageous to provide a system for mounting the power supply in such a way that it can be displaced, but not disconnected from the circuitry in the enclosure, for the purposes of cleaning, testing, or repair.
It would also be advantageous to provide a compact system having circuits with a high density of components packaged together with a sufficient power supply in a relatively small volume.
It would further be advantageous to provide such a compact system with the means to access all the parts of the enclosure during normal operations without the need to dismantle any of the components, circuits or power supplies.
In the present invention, the power supply itself be easily accessed, repaired or replaced. Moreover, this can be achieved without removing the power supply or any other components from the system. This provides the further advantage that other components in the enclosure can also be tested or accessed while the system is still operating. In other words, there is no need to disconnect the circuitry.